“He’s an idiot,” he said with curt resignation. “But if this is how he wants to spend their money, I’m not going to try to stop him. At least it’s good for a laugh.”
Paul hid his hands under the table and clasped them together. He lay his thumb along the cut on his palm and pressed hard, but it refused to sting as much as he wished it would.
“Are you—is the money thing a problem?”
The only reason he’d hesitated was that it sickened him how desperate he was for the question to hurt. If Julian willingly allowed him a glimpse of pain, Paul might feel for a moment that he really mattered—that he could help or offer comfort, find a need in Julian that he could reshape himself to fill.
But Julian’s face didn’t falter. He leaned against the chair and brushed Paul’s hair back from his face with his fingertips—the tenderness was so deliberate and patronizing that Paul wondered for the first time which of them it was meant to convince.
“Julian?”
“Don’t be boring.”
Paul felt himself flush. Julian looked down into his face with cool satisfaction; then he smiled, as if it were Paul who really deserved the pity, and leaned down to lift his arm by the wrist.
“Anyway, it’s under control,” he said carelessly. As he spoke, he turned Paul’s hand over and inspected it. “It’s not worth talking about, maybe you could trust me for once instead of . . . Oh, Pablo, I sort of butchered you, didn’t I?”
Reflected in Julian’s face, Paul could see his own helpless fury. He saw Julian’s bitter impatience, but also his willingness to forgive Paul the anger he so unconvincingly pretended wasn’t there. There was no saying what would happen if Paul let himself snap—You don’t trust me, you don’t need to, how am I supposed to trust you? But Julian allowed him to feel it, and he decided magnanimously that putting Paul in his place wasn’t worth his time. They could have a few happy moments together now, so long as both of them agreed not to talk about anything that mattered.
“Hard to trust you if you’re going to maim me,” was all Paul said, but he could see in Julian’s face that he knew it wasn’t really a joke.
During the long hours they were apart, Paul tried to think of ideas for the game. They were unserious, or at least most of them were. Whenever they reunited Julian came with one or two new ideas of his own, skewing as they always had toward the theatrical and implausible—squashing the subject between the rolling shelves in the library’s compact storage room, shoving him over the railing of the third-floor mezzanine in a fall Paul quickly assured him was survivable. Julian’s favorite ideas of Paul’s were the ones that were gory and outlandish, and Paul indulged him whenever he could, just to make Julian burst into horrified laughter.
Paul no longer bruised his arm in the file drawer to stay awake during long shifts at his grandfather’s garage. Whenever he was bored, he wandered to the office window and peered out at the workspace in search of new techniques. The garage was fertile ground for ideas, filled as it was with toolboxes and tire irons and other agents of blunt force. He was proudest of his unorthodox adaptation of the orbital sander (place foot on subject’s chest, apply sander edge to the throat, turn on). But he found the most practical option in the hydraulic lift. Everyone knew they were dangerous, which meant no one would be too surprised if something went awry and a car crashed down on someone working underneath. It was a solid plan, he told Julian, provided the person you wanted to kill was a mechanic.
The game gave them something to talk about when the fragmentary moments they seized might otherwise be spoiled. They had aligned a break between classes two days a week so they could have lunch together by the fountain, but the hour was far shorter than it had sounded on paper, not least because Julian (in keeping with a long-standing vice of his) was chronically and remorselessly late. If they fell silent too long, Paul’s nerves would spark with frustration, even as he knew he couldn’t let himself lose his temper, because the minutes and seconds were vanishing too quickly to waste on a quarrel. Often he could think of little to say that wasn’t unkind—he just watched Julian eat his dismal lunches of day-old doughnuts or cheese sandwiches, and listened to the irritability in Julian’s voice that meant he was also trying not to snap. For a while Paul spited him by feeling sorry for him, and he hated them both for the hour (really the forty-seven minutes) they wasted twice weekly on resenting each other. So one day he took Julian an extra sandwich and apple with his own lunch, and to keep him from rejecting the gift, Paul brought an offering he knew he would like better.
“The bubble-in-the-artery trick actually works,” he said while Julian—flushed with humiliation—twisted the stem off the apple and refused to meet his eyes. “But it’s got to be a really massive push of air. It looks like a heart attack unless they look more closely. It’s supposed to be excruciating.”
When Julian looked up and smiled, there was a shade of sadness in his face that Paul found almost frightening. But his voice was easy and fond, and when he brushed his fingertips along Paul’s forearm, it felt as intimate as a kiss.
“God, you’re a nightmare,” he said.
Paul tried to bring an idea every day, even when Julian himself seemed for the moment to have exhausted his creativity. The most sensible ideas had to wait for the days Julian was in a vicious mood, because if he could aim his frustration at an imaginary victim, there was less chance he would turn it toward Paul. When he could tell that Julian just needed a laugh, he tried to make his ideas messier and more ridiculous. He often accompanied Julian on late-night visits to the laundromat, where the sickly green light turned the shadows under his eyes into bruise-dark smears. Julian would pace and smoke and assemble a makeshift dinner from the vending machine, and Paul would follow him, voice tamped down to an undertone, explaining his newest plan in vibrant clinical detail. He could never resist puncturing his own ideas, no matter how self-evidently implausible they were—but that made Julian laugh too, and Paul tried not to care that the joke was at his own expense.
When the garage’s potential started to wear thin, Paul tried to find new possibilities at the forest research station, where he was taking a second-year wildlife ecology practicum for his major. But there were fewer options there—potential methods still existed, but they replaced straightforward brutality with a sterile, academic fussiness that Paul found aesthetically displeasing. There were any number of solvents, of course, that would cause a swift and nasty death if a subject were forced to ingest them—but this option lacked flair, and the certainty of detection made the simplicity seem facile rather than elegant. Most of Paul’s ideas there would never be feasible in practice, nor did they approach the cartoonish whimsy of Julian’s favorite offerings. It felt to Paul like a failure of creativity, the same as his inability to follow Julian’s line of reasoning when he theorized about the mistake that had doomed Kazlauskas to ruin.
The practicum instructor was a postdoctoral fellow named Carrie Sullivan. She wore nearly the same glasses as Paul, and was an older version of the kind of bird-boned, practical-looking girl his mother was always pointing out to him. Sullivan’s dissertation had tracked the local population decline of a once-abundant species of hummingbird, and she delighted in telling puns that made the students groan in protest. On days when Paul couldn’t borrow a car from his grandfather’s loaner fleet, he could call Sullivan first thing in the morning; she would pick him up on the way out to the preserve, driving an ugly olive-green pickup with a faded McGovern sticker on the bumper.
Paul bore her no ill will, which was the other problem. The game worked far better if he could picture a specific subject, which was easy at the garage. He hated one of the mechanics, Carl, for the way he talked about his wife as if her every word and movement repulsed him—it was as if he’d been born to be crushed under a broken lift, and Paul privately worked through the plan in far more detail than he afforded most of the others. And now and then there were bad customers, blond suburban housewives or their crew-cutted husbands, who took one look at P
aul’s grandfather and didn’t bother to conceal their suspicion.
But his practicum was mostly conducted in small groups that spent companionably quiet hours in the forest collecting samples and taking notes. Paul liked Sullivan, in a distant and businesslike fashion that he even extended to a handful of his classmates. A few of the other students annoyed him with their obsequious vying for Sullivan’s attention, but even the worst of them were idealists. Nobody majored in ecology for the money, and all of Paul’s classmates were sensitive to the consequences of thoughtless complacency. During lunch they would gather and lament the bad portents they’d found in the field—ponds filled with dead fish, soot-blackened butterflies—and Paul would feel with sudden vehemence that these people were his peers, even if they might never be his friends. It felt perverse to bring them into the game, and so it remained an abstract and idle musing that did little to cheer him during his hours there.
“Maybe it just means you need to pop a few coal mine owners,” Julian suggested once. “Go where the money is. It’s usually a safe bet whoever you find there is worth killing.”
It was one of the evenings when Paul had followed him back from work, but they didn’t have much time left before Paul’s mother would expect him home. Julian was lying on his bed already, still dressed, head pillowed on the side of Paul’s waist. This was the nearest he had come in weeks to acknowledging his parents to Paul at all, even obliquely, and it grazed so close to the memory of summer that Paul had to force himself not to flinch. He didn’t dare pursue the subject in detail; he could barely even allow himself to think about it. He tried to believe that all he pitied Julian for was his exhaustion—the shock of adjusting to a world that Paul had always taken for granted.
Half expecting Julian to hit him for it, Paul loosened his tie for him and slowly pulled it free. Julian didn’t protest. He just glanced up and smiled, and he looked so weary and unguarded that Paul believed—if only for a moment—that there was something in him that Julian needed.
“I thought of one today,” he said, while Julian squirmed drowsily out of his shirt. “I think it’s kind of your style.”
Julian threw the shirt on the floor and settled against his waist again. “Try me.”
“The Chem department has one of those big old-fashioned autoclaves that start automatically when the door shuts,” said Paul. “We could stick Brady from Ethics class in there and steam him like a dumpling.”
“Ugh, Pablo!” said Julian, delighted. “That has to be the worst one you’ve ever thought of.”
4.
He was getting better at giving his family the lies they wanted. That wasn’t the same as the lies becoming easier.
It wasn’t Julian’s kind of lying. Paul couldn’t invent a new reality from whole cloth, much less pretend to believe it. But he’d developed a surprising intuition for which fragments of himself his family could tolerate, and he was able, with effort, to slice away every extraneous truth until only the acceptable parts of him were visible.
They all wanted to see different things, though their desires lay within the same tight constraints. His mother wanted the piece of Paul that was fond of Laurie, the one that would pick up a quart of milk on the way home without being asked; the Paul who could muddle dutifully through please, thank you, nice to meet you, but not the Paul who found it exhausting. His grandparents wanted his sense of justice, his agreeable ear for talk of labor unions and black civil rights and every other way they had spent their lives trying to heal the world’s wounds. He could also keep his grandfather happy with idle chatter about baseball and Watergate and his grandfather’s park-bench chess games. His grandmother preferred him when he listened, placid and uncomplaining, to historical facts and funny anecdotes she had told dozens of times before.
But they liked him best, all three of them, when they could see the part of him that was shy. Everything about him that worried them could be explained by shyness, benignly and cleanly. He just couldn’t slip up and let them see any shard of truth that might complicate it.
The performance was exhausting. Julian tried to explain to him that what he was doing was not lying but “code-switching”; like most liars, Julian had a very narrow definition of what lying actually entailed. But to Paul the difference was semantic. If code-switching deserved its own name, it wasn’t because it was any different from lying; it was because this particular type of lying was so much more agonizing than the others.
There were moments, out of sight of anybody who might object, when the forsaken honesty would swell forth in a rush. When his mother wasn’t looking, Paul stopped forcing himself to return the neighbors’ false smiles when they engaged him in small talk. They already thought he was unfriendly, had thought so since he was a little boy, when shyness really was his most glaring transgression. He was finally giving them what they had always asked of him, and he delighted in watching them regret it. He also stopped feigning indifference toward Carl at the repair garage, not bothering to hold his face steady during a tasteless joke or a vicious remark about his wife. Carl must have complained, because Paul’s grandfather pulled him aside one day to inquire about it. Before he could stop himself, Paul enumerated the reasons for his disgust so vehemently that it startled both of them. (Carl, clearly having been chastised, abruptly stopped mentioning his wife at work at all.)
And one night, when Paul was bicycling home from the library through streets slick with rain, a car nearly struck him as it was running a red light. A year before he would have been paralyzed, alight with anger and fear but incapable of action. Now, though, he didn’t give himself a chance to think. Before the car could peel away, Paul whipped a bottle of soda from his knapsack and threw it at the back windshield.
He didn’t register what he’d done until the car screeched to a halt, its back window cratered and sweating pebbles of broken bottle glass. Paul fled, blood glittering with adrenaline, until he’d gone two miles off course and was certain the driver had lost his trail. When it was all over he felt perfectly, exhilaratingly calm, and that night he slept so soundly that the incident might as well have been a bad dream. The only thing that nagged at him, distantly, was how little the near miss had managed to upset him.
What hung heavier in his memory was a chance meeting about a week later. It was Rosh Hashanah, which meant the synagogue’s basement social hall was crowded with the sheepish strangers from other neighborhoods who only materialized on high holidays. Paul’s grandmother was paying rapt attention to him, which meant he’d sanded himself down to a sliver rather than worry her.
She had picked out a girl for Paul to meet, which was becoming a habit of hers. Today’s offering was slim and solemn, hair a deeper red than Paul’s own, with a father who was supposed to be impressive in some way that Paul hadn’t bothered to commit to memory. “Find a way to let her know how smart you are,” his grandmother said as usual, as she gave him a slight push to send him on his way. “Good girls know how important that is.”
As it happened, he never spoke to the girl at all. He was putting off the conversation as long as he thought he could get away with, dawdling by the carafe to fill a Styrofoam coffee cup drop by drop, when a corduroy elbow bumped against his arm. “Excuse me,” he heard, from a voice whose familiarity should have warned him to look away. By the time they recognized each other, they had made eye contact, and it was already too late to escape.
“Paul Fleischer!” Professor Strauss, inexplicably, seemed delighted to see him. He was unchanged, down to the arthritic twitch of his hands and the bleach spot on the plaid cuff of his shirt. “It’s such a small town this time of year—semester off to a good start, I hope?”
Paul didn’t relish the idea of making small talk with Strauss, but he felt the red-haired girl’s presence behind him and could see his grandmother over Strauss’s shoulder, making small frantic gestures for him to extricate himself. He felt a defiant thrill when he realized he could ignore her. And as was so often the case lately, once he began talkin
g, he couldn’t stop.
Strauss seemed intent on keeping things light. He avoided the topic of the Ethics seminar, instead asking politely about Paul’s new classes. He seized immediately on the subject of Paul’s field practicum—he must believe it was a safe avenue of discussion.
“It’s good to get out of the classroom and spend some time outdoors, I imagine.” Strauss glanced across the room, toward a middle-aged woman who was chatting with the rabbi—graying dark hair, high cheekbones, professorial shabbiness that resembled his own. “My wife and I are both birders, too, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned—wait, no, forgive me, you’re the lepidopterist—but there’s a kinship, isn’t there? Early mornings in the wilderness, life lists, that meditative quality of watching and waiting. If I had it to do again,” he added confidentially, “I might study ecology myself just for the excuse to get out there more often.”
Paul watched Strauss’s wife as he spoke, only half listening. They looked like siblings, in the way married couples often did; Paul wondered if men and women did that on purpose, choosing mates who were otherwise much like them in order to mitigate the other gender’s unfamiliarity. He pictured the two of them with matching binoculars and rainproof parkas, trudging together through a meadow and hoping to catch sight of one of the hummingbirds whose epitaph Sullivan had written in her dissertation.
Paul looked down into his tepid coffee, finally pouring in the packet of creamer he’d been fidgeting with for ten minutes. White bloomed up from the bottom of the cup like a mushroom cloud. An irrepressible outrage had started to stir at the back of his tongue.
“One of my classmates,” he said suddenly, “keeps finding sick frogs.”
Strauss looked a little perturbed at Paul’s frankness. A crease appeared at his brow, and he took a deep drink from his own cup, buying himself time to think of something to say.
“I shouldn’t say ‘sick,’” Paul pressed on breathlessly. “‘Mutated’ is more accurate. Extra legs, or missing ones, or they’re growing from the wrong place. One had a fully formed eye in the middle of its abdomen.”
These Violent Delights Page 21
